Day 7-8 - Jun 7-8, 2018 Sintra & Lisbon, Portugal

We visited the best museum in Lisbon, Museu Calouste Gulbenkian.  This is a private museum and very well run.  Unfortunately, in Portugal, it seems the best tourist facilities or attractions are private run.  The museum exhibits the private collection of a wealthy oil baron.  It's now a foundation who is also forefront in promoting modern art in Portugal.  The key pieces of the collection include the painting "An Old Man" by Rembrandt, mosque lamps, and old Indian books.  We are sorry to say that we couldn't appreciate much of the modern art collections.

We drove to Sintra and spent one day exploring the town and two palaces, Palacio da Pena and Palácio de Moserrate.  The town itself didn't impress us much, just the usual tourist traps.  We were wise to skip the Palácio Nacional de Sintra and went to the Pena Palace!  It was quite a drive to get up the steep and narrow (and luckily one way) road to reach the palace.  After paying the admission, it's another 15 mins hike up steep paths before we got a glimpse of the fairytale castle!  And what a sight!  The castle is painted in such vibrant colors (yellow, blue, red,...) that it is almost surreal that it existed!  You can almost imagine a dragon may jump out in front of you anytime!

The palace started as usual as a monastery but it was severely damaged and laid abandoned by the great 1755 earthquake.  King Ferdinand II acquired and turned it into a summer palace in the 18th century, building it in romanticist style.  Interestingly, there were many Moorish features incorporated into the palace.  It's so picturesque and scenic that we spent way too much time there, cutting my ambitious itinerary for the day short!

On the advice of one of the woman attendants there, we changed our next destination to Palácio de Moserrate instead of driving to Mafra.  We weren't disappointed.  This is a villa style of palace built by a British textile tycoon Francis Cook in the 1860s.  This guy must be super rich because the inside is gorgeous, built in Sintra Romanticist plus Moorish revival styles.  At its height, his huge art collections there included "Salvator Mundi", the recently rediscovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci sold at an auction for US $450 MM dollars (the most expensive painting ever sold) to Abu Dhabi!  So this guy has taste!  Too bad the whole collection was auctioned off due to hard time by his descendants in the 1930s after the economic crisis.  The whole place then fell into disrepair and only recent got refurbished by the government. 

We also drive by another attraction, Quinta da Regaleira but without parking facilities, we chose to skip going inside.

Day 6 - Jun 6, 2018 Evora & Lisbon, Portugal

We visited Evora's most famous site this morning: Igreja de Sao Francisco and its associated Capela dos Ossos (Bone Chapel).  This chapel is built entirely out of bones and cement.  It's estimated there are over 5000 bones belonging to the monks used to build this chapel.  Despite its gruesome look, the purpose of this chapel is to remind us the fleeting nature of life itself.  The saying on the entrance door translates to "We bones that here are, for yours await".  The museum inside the rebuilt church is also nicely done and gives a fantastic view of the hill city.

Next we drove to the nearby archeological site "Cromeleque dos Almendres" which is a megalithic complex consisting of a collection of giant stones laying out in specific positions for what believes to be religious or just ceremonial purpose.  The construction of this complex dates back over 6000BC!  This is the "Stonehenge" of Portugal!

After almost a week of touring Portugal and Spain since we landed in Lisbon, we came full circle back to Lisbon.   First thing we noticed is that Lisbon is filled with tourists.  Everywhere is busy and filled with people.  Walking down the wide Avenida Liberdade, you can feel the grandeur of decades or even centuries past when Portugal was the world power.  The iconic Lisbon trams ply the streets near the waterfront.  In the distance across the river, we could see the long bridge where we drove into the city.  Lisbon also has a statue of Christ on top of the hill across the river.

Day 5 - Jun 5, 2018 Cordoba, Spain, Elvas & Evora, Portugal

We changed direction and turned back to Portugal today via Cordoba and Elvas to reach Evora.  Cordoba is famous for its Mezquita, reportedly the second most beautiful building after Alhambra.  This is originally a mosque built by the Moors after their conquest of Spain but later turned into an impressive cathedral.  The combination of two styles makes it unique.  What impressed us most is its size and the use of white and grey slate to build all the arches.  This cathedral holds the record of being the longest active continuous use of weekly worship in Spain since the 12th century.

For us, getting there is probably even more exciting than the destination itself as Google Map really doesn't care about street size.  As we get closer, the streets get narrower as Cordoba is an ancient city with a maze of narrow lanes in its old town.  There is barely enough room to walk, let alone drive!  On top, we encountered several "Telus" type of employees pulling cables outside the buildings blocking the whole street and they did not have any intention to move!  Only reluctantly they symbolically moved their ladders and bodies to the side and expected me to pass.  In these narrow encounters,  you just have to first fold the two side mirrors in and start driving with your eyes closed and pray very hard!!

What really amazed me is that we saw people driving minivans (European size ones) zooming by among these narrow mazes of streets!  Talk about driving skills!  I swear they probably have only few centimeters of space on both sides of their vehicles!

At the border town of Badajoz, we wanted to fill up before crossing back to Portugal as we noticed the gas price was significantly cheaper in Spain than Portugal.  At the gas station, it's the same scene as our Blaine border with vehicles lining up to fill up.  The difference is that it's not self-serve but there was only ONE attendant serving all 12 gas pumps!  He had this system of almost dancing among the different pumps, first asking whether you want to top up full and yell for the folks inside to activate the pump, then quickly ran to the next pump to repeat the same.  Chaotic!

Elvas is another UNESCO town in Portugal which boasts several sites worthy of its own visit.  We went to the Forte da Graca which is absolutely stunning!  It's built to defend against the Spanish invasion.  It's so massive and sit on top of a hill with a commanding view of the nearby town and its Roman aqueduct.  There was only a handful of tourists there so we had the whole place to ourselves to explore.  They opened all the doors to let us explore all the nooks and corridors.  The nearby aqueduct is huge and it's probably the tallest we've seen so far.

Evora is the town we stayed the night.  On arrival, I noticed I booked a room with shared bath by error!  On top, the B&B has misled people about its room sizes.  We had barely enough room to stretch, let alone to open our luggage.  Other than these two items, it's actually a decent place with high quality linens and extremely clean. It came with U-serve breakfast and a beautiful rooftop terrace overlooking the top attraction of Igreja de Sao Francisco.  We decided to have our own ham & cheese with wine dinner there for the night!